LR Export JPEG Quality

[hendrb01]

When publishing my latest blog article, using my new 5DMKIV, I noticed something rather surprising after exporting the JPEG from lightroom.. The sky had quite a notable dithering (banding) effect. I was a little concerned that this might be an artifact from the camera and was relieved when going back to the original photo in Lightroom the banding was not present.

Architecture -w polarizer.jpg (826.84 KiB) Viewed 23581 times

So I did some tests, and noted a few things.

The Canon in camera JPEG was 12.1MB

The full quality LR JPEG was surprisingly 17.0 MB

The exported file with the banding present was limited to 1,1MB

Using Quality value 30, which generated a 1.69MB file, the banding was almost completely gone.

At quality value 40, and a 2.33MB file there was no banding.

I guess making the files blog friendly really take a toll on the picture quality. Though I do wonder why Lightrooms JPEG compression seems to not be as efficient as in camera JPEG.